Weatherwatch - November/December 2009

In a complete reversal from October, mild, mostly dry weather prevailed across much of the nation during November. In fact, November temperatures averaged more than 10°F above normal at a few locations in the north-central United States, while near- to slightly-below-normal readings were confined to the Deep South and the Pacific Northwest.

Following the nation's wettest October on record, large areas of the country received little precipitation during November. One exception was the Southeast, from Alabama into the southern Mid-Atlantic States, where the remnants of Hurricane Ida and several nontropical storms dumped heavy rain. Pockets of unfavorable wetness also persisted across the middle Mississippi Valley and the upper Midwest. The chronic Midwestern wetness wreaked havoc on the corn harvest, leaving more than one in five fields (21 percent) unharvested by November 29. That represented the nation's slowest pace corn harvest since 1992.